> Not necessarily. You should be able to do it with any formatwith a good catalog system, but some will be easier than others.
How would you handle resizes? Either we could do immediate compaction or garbage collection. Both have their disadvantages.
Correct.
> >How about a TIFF-like directory chunk at the beginning (except>hierarchical)?
That would be one solution - sure.
Can you think of a better one?
Well, it needs to be a directory of some sort - whether it is TIFF-like, XML-based, ZIP-like, whatever..
I think the goal of the XCF redesign is to become the de-facto standard for interchange of layered images.
Unless you get Adobe to adopt support for it in their applications - that simply won't happen! Whether you like it or not, Adobe is the standards bearer in this regard, followed by the other major commercial players - Corel, Jasc, etc.
And that is also part of my suggestion for using a pre-existing format like TIFF or PSD. There is always wide support for them...
In other words, any XCF reader should be able to read any XCF writer's output.
A reasonable requirement, to an extent. Do we expect that every XCF reader support ALL features of XCF?
A layered TIFF by that name wouldn't cut it, because most tiff readers don't support layered images.
Sure they do! Well, at least for any program that supports multiple layers/pages to begin with. And this goes to the question above...
If my application doesn't support a particular feature of XCF, am I not compliant? Should I not bother doing XCF?
Of course, we could always use TIFF internally but call it XCF.
We could do that.
Adobe does that with .ai, which is really .pdf...
We might want to change the magic number as well.
Wouldn't do that, since the whole idea is to maintain compatibility...
I have no problem with basing Portable XCF on TIFF. It seems to be well designed without really being too overdesigned. On the other hand, I think there are a few improvements that we could make to make it better for the purposes of GIMP.
I agree, though I think we can add all of these through additional tags and not having to redesign...
/me wonders if the CinePaint people have any thoughts...
Definitely!
Leonard -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:leonardr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> <http://www.lazerware.com>
